'"Turn from this City, O Lord," they sang, "Thine
anger and wrath, and turn it from Thy Holy House, for we have
sinned." And then in strange contrast came the jubilant
cry of the older Hebrew worship--the cry which Gregory had wrested
in prophetic earnestness from the name of the Yorkshire King
in the Roman market-place, "Alleluia."'--GREEN's Making
of England.

THE stranger who is borne rapidly along the railway through
the luxuriant hop-grounds and cherry-orchards of Kent, cannot
fail to be struck with the air of antiquity that meets him as
he draws near the ancient city of Canterbury. Like the Cathedral
at Cologne, the Canterbury Minster is visible from a considerable
distance long before any of the rest of the town can be seen,
and marks the spot which has been the resort of crowds of pilgrims.
But there is another [1/2] building, not so conspicuous to the
view of the traveller, which has an equally remarkable history,
and is one of the most ancient centres of early Christian teaching--the
Monastery of S. Augustine. Its foundation connects itself with
the story, so old and yet so ever fresh, of the meeting in the
market-place of Rome between Gregory the Great, then a Roman
deacon, [(1) One of the seven regionary deacons of Rome, and
Abbot of the religious house he had founded on the Clian Hill.]
and a group of slaves from our island. Every one has heard how,
amongst the newly arrived [(2) Bede, H. E. ii. 1. The
date of Gregory's meeting with the English slaves at Rome is
fixed between 585 and 588 by the fact that after his long stay
at Constantinople, he returned to Rome in 585 or 586. On the
other hand, Ælla, whom the slaves owned as their King,
died in 588.--GREEN's Making of England, p. 216, n.] bales
of goods, he noticed three boys distinguished for their fair
complexion, their fair faces, and their light flaxen hair. 'What
is the name of the nation from which these slaves are brought?'
asked Gregory of the trader. 'They are Angles,' was his reply.
Struck with pity, he answered, playing with the word in poetic
humour, 'Rightly are they called "Angles," for their
faces are the faces of angels, and they ought to be fellow-heirs
with the angels of heaven.' 'And from what country,' he proceeded,
'do they come?' 'From Deira,' [(3) The country from the Humber
to the Wear.] said [2/3] the merchant. 'De ira!' was the untranslatable
reply of the deacon. 'Rightly are they called "Deirans."
From the ire of God are they plucked, and to the mercy
of God are they called.' 'And what is the name of their King?'
'Ælla,' was the answer. The word reminded him of the Hebrew
expression of praise, and he answered, 'Alleluia shall be sung
in. Ælla's land.'

Years passed away, but Gregory never forgot that moving sight.
Once he set out himself secretly from Rome, and was pushing on
towards the Alps that he might cross over to the land of those
'angel-faces,' when he was recalled by the united voice of the
Roman people to become Pope himself in 590. Six years passed
away, and then he found himself able to carry out his dream of
winning over Britain to the Faith. The marriage of Bertha with
Æthelbert, the Kentish King, who had established his sway
over a large part of the island, gave him the opportunity he
had sought, and after cautious negotiations with the Frankish
rulers of Gaul for the protection of his missionaries, he sent
Augustine from the Benedictine Monastery of S. Andrew on the
Clian Hill, to undertake the arduous but glorious task. With
forty companions Augustine set out, and after a tedious journey
over the Alps and through Gaul, landed at Ebbe's Fleet, in the
Isle of Thanet, and at the [3/4] invitation of Æthelbert
entered the rude city of Canterbury, then embosomed in thickets,
bearing before them a silver cross with a picture of Christ,
and chanting a solemn Litany. Taking up their abode in the Stable
Gate, near the present Church of S. Alphege, the little band
laboured on, and on the Feast of Whit-Sunday the King was baptized.
Augustine then restored the church in the city, which had been
built by Roman believers, and dedicated it in the name of the
Divine Saviour, our Lord Jesus Christ. Then he purified and consecrated,
in the name of S. Pancras, [(1) In order that by the selection
of this saint, he might keep in memory the spot where he had
himself lived for so long a time at Rome, for the Monastery of
S. Andrew was situated on the ground which had once been the
property of the noble family to which S. Pancras belonged.--See
Pauli's Pictures of Old England, p. 9.] a small temple,
midway between the city walls and the Church of S. Martin, selecting
for the patron-saint of his church the youthful martyr who had
been put to death for his faith during the Diocletian persecution.
He next founded a monastery not far from the city, towards the
east, 'In which,' says Bede, 'Æthelbert built the church
of the blessed Apostles, Peter and Paul, and endowed it with
various gifts.' [(2) Bede, H. E. i. 33.] From this beginning
rose the establishment afterwards known as the Abbey of S. Peter,
S. Paul, and S. Augustine. The main [4/5] object both of the
King and S. Augustine was to provide in the new monastery an
appropriate burial-place, not only for themselves, but their
successors in all future ages. The site, therefore, was chosen
without the walls, [(1) By the side of the great paved Roman
road, which then ran from Dover to Canterbury over S. Martin's
Hill.] for the rule of Roman and of Saxon Britain, as well as
of Rome itself, forbade the burial of a dead man within the city,
[(2) As also, so Thomas of Elmham seems to think, in fancied
imitation of our Lord Himself, who 'suffered without the gate.'--Thomas
of Elmham, Hist. Mon. S. Aug., Ch, 10, Rolls Series.]
and thus the spot in which were buried the remains of the first
primate of England and the first Christian English king, served
to remind the far-travelled companions of Augustine in their
remote mission of the Appian Way in the great capital of the
West, as the church of S. Pancras was intended to remind them
of the Clian Hill and their distant homes.

Augustine died on the 26th of May, 605, with the joint titles
of Abbot and Archbishop. He was succeeded by Peter, the first
sole Abbot, and one of his companions. Being drowned soon after
on his passage to France, whither he had been sent on a mission
by the King, he was succeeded, in 607, by John, another of the
associates of the first primate. In his time the Church of the
Abbey was completed, and on its [5/6] consecration by Laurentius,
in 613, the remains of Augustine were transported thither from
the open cemetery where they had been first interred, [(1) While
the bodies of his Queen Bertha and her chaplain Luidhardt were
laid in the porch of S. Martin.] and the name of the first primate
of England was occasionally substituted for those of the two
great Apostles. Æthelbert endowed the Abbey with large
and rich possessions, and Gregory provided the materials for
the first Library of the brethren, sending amongst other volumes
two MS. Gospels, written in Roman uncials with gold on a purple
ground, one of which is preserved in the Bodleian Library at
Oxford, and the other at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.

The first four Abbots were the companions of the Mission of
the founder. The fifth, Petronius, was of Roman birth. He was
succeeded, in 655, by Nathanael, who had come to England with
Mellitus and Justus. The seventh, Abbot Adrian, was sent to England
by Pope Vitalian as companion and adviser of Archbishop Theodore,
lest any shade of Greek heterodoxy should be introduced by the
new primate into Britain. Adrian was an African by birth, and
had been Abbot of the monastery of Niridia, near Naples. He was
learned in sacred literature, and [6/7] skilled in the Latin
and Greek languages, [(1) Bede, H. E., iv. 1.] and governed
the Abbey from 673 to 708. Greek was, of course, the native tongue
of Theodore of Tarsus, and with the new Abbot by his side, a
famous school was established at Canterbury, where the scheme
of instruction embraced not only Latin and Greek, but 'the astronomy,
.the arithmetic, and the poetic art of the time,' [(2) Green's
Making of England, p. 305.] and the two eminent men gathered
round them a crowd of disciples. One of these scholars was Albinus,
Adrian's successor. To him we owe a great debt of gratitude.
We have Bede's own assurance that it was he who had the chief
hand in inducing him to write his history of the English Church,
[(3) Bede, H. E., Preface.] and who supplied him with
information concerning Kent and the adjoining regions.

But Adrian and Theodore had a still more eminent pupil. This
was Aldhelm, of princely blood, [(4) A kinsman of the royal house
of Wessex, and probably a son of one of the West-Saxon Kings.--Green's
Making of England, p. 336.] from the district of the West
Saxons. Born about the middle of the seventh century, and educated
first under Maidulf, an Irish wanderer, in the woodlands of Malmesbury,
he removed to Canterbury, and made [7/8] himself master of all
the knowledge of his day. On his return to Wessex he became Maidulf's
successor, and greatly promoted the spread of the Christian faith
in the West of England. His exertions made Wessex during the
first half of the eighth century a rival of Northumbria, and
he occupies a very important position in the history of English
literature. 'He was the first Englishman who cultivated classical
learning with any success, and the first of whom any literary
remains are preserved.' [(1) Bishop Stubbs in Smith's Dict.
Eccl. Biog., i. 78.] Moreover, he was the first singer of
his race, and the English songs, with which he attracted groups
of hearers around him, were the means of winning not a few to
the faith, and led the way in that upgrowth of popular poetry
which was soon to fill the land with English verse. Thus, while
'Cambridge was a desolate fen, and Oxford was a tangled forest
in a wide waste of waters,' [(2) Stanley's Memorials of Canterbury,
p. 26.] classical knowledge and English learning flourished in
the mother school of Canterbury. Albinus is said to have become
afterwards Abbot of Tournay, but it is more probable that he
died Abbot of S. Augustine's, and was buried in the church of
S. Mary under the Abbey. Cuthbert, the great friend of the eminent
missionary S. Boniface, obtained permission for the burial of
the Archbishops [8/9] of Canterbury in their own Cathedral Church
instead of at S. Augustine's. The circumstances of his interment
were remarkable. The bell tolled for his decease in 758, and
the monks of S. Augustine's came in procession to the palace
to carry off the body of the deceased prelate and inter it in
their church. Now for the first time they heard that Cuthbert
had died three days before, and had been laid in his grave at
Christ's Church in the dead of night. This excited great wrath,
and on the death of Bregwin, his successor, Jambert, the Abbot
of S. Augustine's, went with a number of soldiers to claim the
body. Finding, however, that the monks of Christ Church had repeated
the stratagem which had succeeded so well in the case of Cuthbert,
he complained loudly of the injustice, and appealed to the Pope
for redress. Admiring his courage, or hoping in this way to settle
the dispute between the rival Abbeys, the monks of Christ Church
elected Jambert Archbishop, and all his successors were buried
there.

Of Jambert's successors in the Abbacy little is known beyond
their names and the dates of their appointment. Meanwhile the
Monastery had become a centre of greater influence than that
which was attached to it as the burial-place of Kings and Archbishops.
Owing its existence to the missionary S. Augustine, it [9/10]
laboured to develop missionary work throughout the neighbouring
regions, and to be a centre of light to the kingdoms around.
But this was not all. The brothers of the monastery did not keep
the faith to themselves. When the Teuton of the Continent began
to cry from his native forests, like the Macedonians of old,
'Come over and help us,' the sons of the early evangelised English
Church were prepared to go forth in their turn and emulate the
zeal of their Celtic predecessors. Wilfrid and Willibrord, Egbert
and Willehad, and many others, Teutons themselves, devoted themselves
to evangelising the Teutons of Frisia and northern Germany. Shortly
after the year 710 we find Winfrid, or, as he was afterwards
known, S. Boniface, sent by King Ina to consult Archbishop Birhtwald
and attend a Council summoned by that prelate. We may be sure
he would visit the famous monastic school at Canterbury, and
strengthen those early impressions which were already beckoning
him on to his subsequent career of self-devotion and his death
by martyrdom on the shore of the Zuyder Zee. [(1) See his letter
written afterwards to the Bishops, Clergy, and principal Abbots
in England, begging for aid in his Mission on the Continent.--Ep,
xxxii, Migne, Patrologia, Sæc, viii.] The disciples
of Adrian and Theodore, of Albinus and Aldhelm, little knew how
much depended [10/11] on their labours. They knew not, they who
toiled here in Kent, that God had given these half-barbarian
islanders among whom they had cast in their lot, a treasure far
more precious in their iron and coal fields than silver and gold,
and that these dark, intractable minerals [(1) See Bishop Lightfoot's
Sermon, preached at Bedford, on the 'Mustard Seed and the Leaven.']
would in the lapse of centuries become the chief means alike
of locomotion and manufacture, so that their ships should anchor
in all ports, and their tongue be heard in all lands, and their
customs, institutions, modes of thought, be transplanted to the
most diverse regions of the globe. They knew not, they never
dreamt, that in spite of many faults in their natural character,
these peoples possessed a spirit of enterprise and a stubbornness
of determination, which could fit them to occupy not only a high
and lordly place in Europe, but to colonise half a new-found
world, 'to inherit India, to fill the islands of unknown seas,
to be the craftsmen, the traders, the colonists, the explorers
of the earth, and with their brethren on the Continent to be
the fathers of a nobler and grander Europe than any that history
had yet known.' [(2) Dean Church's Christianity and the Teutonic
Races, pp. 99, 101.] All this was hidden from their sight,
while Abbot succeeded Abbot in the monastery of S. Augustine,
of [11/12] many of whom little is known beyond their names and
the dates of their appointment. But it was not hidden from the
providence of God.

In 978 we stand on somewhat surer ground. In this year Elfnoth,
the 35th Abbot, re-dedicated the church in the names of S. Peter,
S. Paul, and S. Augustine; and now the comparatively peaceful
times during the reigns of the Saxon Kings were succeeded by
the troubled period of the Danish invasions. Almost all Æthelbert's
successors had added something to the rapidly increasing possessions
of the Abbey, and in Thorn's Chronicle we have long lists
of deeds of gift, and confirmations of rights, privileges, and
immunities. In the time of Elmer, the 38th Abbot, the Danes invaded
England, and harassed the shores of Kent. The Abbey, however,
remained secure, and escaped the general pillage and slaughter.
Some few, indeed, bolder or more mischievous than the rest, attempted,
we are told, to pillage the shrine, and one tore off the rich
pall from the altar of S. Augustine, and drew upon himself a
terrible, if not a miraculous, punishment. The Danes, therefore,
found it safer, and perhaps more profitable, to protect than
to pillage. Cnut the Mighty, on his arrival, was ever a generous
friend to the Abbey, and almost to the exclusion, it is said,
of all others, bestowed upon it many gifts, and chose from the
society [12/13] bishops and abbots for many places. Ulfric, the
40th Abbot, was sent by Edward the Confessor to the Council of
Rheims in A.D. 1046; and while on a mission at Rome, some years
after, obtained from the Pope authority to occupy in councils
a place and dignity next to the Abbot of Monte Casino, the great
head of the Benedictine Order.